i use a program called Audacity also found on download.com. it lets me cut songs, chop and screw, even make them louder (but not much louder without distortion). it has several other features that are useful

Once you cut the song down to 30 secs using Audacity, how do you then convert it to Mp3? When I try to save it and export it as Mp3 it brings up a message saying that I need to use LAME library to handle Mp3 encoding.